"Hi Hitler!: How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in..." Topic

… Contemporary Culture by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld.

"Hi Hitler" offers a fascinating look at contemporary culture and the various forms the memory of the Holocaust and Hitler have taken in today's society. The text features six chapters with the most interesting (for this reader) being the first three, which highlighted how our memory of the Second World War as the 'Good War' has continued to be challenged by various authors, discussions revolving around the 'uniqueness' of the Holocaust, and how counterfactual history is applied to the Holocaust.

In the first chapter the author traces the numerous volumes that have recently appeared challenging the well-entrenched narrative of the Second World War as being something unrepresentative of the facts. Rosenfeld himself never really comes out with his own opinion on whether the Second World War was a 'Good War' but allows the reader to view the intricacies of the debate(s) that have raged around the question, the authors who've written on the topic, the reviews their books have received, and the validity of the information presented in respective publications. Some are easy to critique and show for the shallow efforts that they are, while others raise important questions about the nature of war and how war remembrance is embraced within societies and then helps to shape their views and ideas up to the present (more than once is the connection made to our post 9-11 rhetoric). Similar themes are explored in regards to Europe (both western and eastern) in how they've treated the Second World War, especially the numerous attempts by various organizations and governments to equate the Nazi regime with that of Stalin's Soviet Union…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Not surprised, really, especially since Uncle Joe has received a lot of positive press from people in some quarters.

especially the numerous attempts by various organizations and governments to equate the Nazi regime with that of Stalin's Soviet Union

Was the Holocaust an unique event? How it compares with other actions of mass murder? Is it mass murder particular to a single type of totalitarianism? Or is it characteristic of all totalitarianisms?

The opening of Soviet archives after 1991 provided historians with a wealth of information that was lacking previously. Before the fall of the USSR historical discourse on Stalin's repression was limited to foreign diplomats reports, some official histories commissioned after 1956 and dissidents memoirs. It was conditioned by the Cold War, and easily dismissed as part of smearing campaigns of propaganda.

I believe that historical events are unique, but that it can be compared to other contemporary events to better our understanding of them. The comparison between Nazi's mass murders and Soviet's mass murders is a case in point. Both shared some similarities: artificial creation of a class of enemies, dehumanization of the victims, a narrative based upon a brilliant future that could only be achieved after the physical dissapearence of those enemies, use of pseudo-science to justify the discourse of murder, despise of petite burgeois (i.e. democratic) ideals, ecc. However, there were differences and it is in the analysis of those where we learn the uniqueness of each approach to genocide.

I am of the opinion that with Soviet and Nazi mass murders mankind constructed a new type of genocide, particular to modernity. Before, genocide was an after-effect of economic explotation (slave trade, Spanish and Portuguese explotation of the America's, destruction of the Indian tribes in North America, Congo's explotation by the Belgians, ecc). It wasn't ideologically linked to the creation of a new paradise on Earth. Soviet and Nazi approaches to genocide changed the discourse; now it was a neccesary step in the path to a perfected vision of the future.

Remember that Mongaols had a rather harsh policy regarding their enemies, not only for their armies but their population too. The difference between soviet and nazi mass murder lies in the racial background of the latter. The soviet regime did purge social elements including incarceration and a good deal of executions and mass deportations of suspect ethnic groups (not that it justifies them in any case, but it puts those acts in a perspective). The nazi regime did also proceed to the extermination of whole ehtnic groups, using industrial murder; they went a step beond, that definitive step beyond, making an industry of killing human beings nased solely on their ethnic procedence, that ethnic procedence not being politically, even socially suspect of anything but racial diversity. American indians, African slaves and other cases in the colonial times, or the occasional mass murder in the Albigensian or holy land crusades, were a thing of a given place and time, and not an institutionalized policy.